As a music critic, it’s my solemn duty to take potshots at the Grammys whenever they’re guilty of bad taste, which is pretty much all of the time. However, sometimes this dubious sense of what’s good and what’s not works in the Grammys’ favor. This applies most often to the artist collaborations that inevitably make up a significant portion of the talent roster every year.
You know the drill: The Grammys love to take artists from different genres and generations, who would never otherwise appear together, and mash them up. The reasoning here can’t be disputed: If you really want to see, say, Jay-Z, Linkin Park, and Paul McCartney share a stage, this is literally the only show on network television that would dare to put that on.
The obvious downside to this methodology is that artists who have nothing in common often don’t actually belong together, especially on live television after minimal rehearsals. The potential for disaster is high.
It’s worth noting that sometimes these collaborations do work, particularly if there’s some sort of logic driving them. Putting Tina Turner and Beyonce together made sense. Kanye West performing with Daft Punk also made sense. Imagine Dragons and Kendrick Lamar, no matter their diverging critical reputations, complemented each other. Even that Jay-Z/Linkin Park/Paul McCartney collaboration worked better on TV than it would appear on paper.
And then there are the collaborations that simply don’t work at all. At the 47th annual Grammys in 2005, my favorite non-working collaborations occurred. It started with a bracingly unoriginal idea: Let’s pay tribute to the Beatles! But how? The Grammys decided to assemble a mismatched group of famous musicians: Bono, Stevie Wonder, Norah Jones, Brian Wilson, Alicia Keys, Billie Joe Armstrong, Alison Krauss, Steven Tyler, Tim McGraw and Scott Weiland. And then they pushed that crew out on stage, with the backing of mid-’00s rock supergroup Velvet Revolver, and had them sing a woefully under-rehearsed rendition of “Across The Universe.”
The result is the worst, and also the best, Grammy collaboration ever. Let’s walk through it.
:01: Anthony LaPaglia is tapped to do the introduction. I understand that CBS’ intention was to give the star of the extremely CBS-sounding crime drama Without A Trace some shine, but I prefer to believe that they were banking on the leading man of Empire Records giving what we’re about to see some real rock and roll credibility.
:14: What stands out immediately before anyone starts singing is that Steven Tyler is playing maracas and the sound engineer has opted to place them relatively high in the mix. This doesn’t bode well. The Beatles never put maracas on the original “Across The Universe.” The Grammys should have paid tribute to the Beatles generally avoiding maracas.
:26: Bono is the first to sing, and he’s struggling to keep pace with the sluggish backbeat provided by Matt Sorum, who is sabotaging this performance just as he did the Use Your Illusion albums. (Velvet Revolver is the backing band! Because Velvet Revolver was huge in ’05! Because the mid-’00s occurred in 1998.) This isn’t my favorite Bono era — he unwisely resurrected his brown mullet from the Under The Red Sky period and added some red wrap-around shades. He looks like one of the announcers from The Hunger Games. Wikipedia reminds me that U2 won Album of the Year the following year for How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, beating out Kanye West’s Late Registration. Twitter was created the following month just so people could complain incessantly about this sort of thing in the future.
:31: Stevie Wonder sings the next lines, which are supposed to go like this: “Pools of sorrow, waves of joy, are drifting through my open mind / possessing and caressing me.” Stevie instead sings it like this: “Peas of pur, ways of mur, drifting though my open mind / caressing and caressing me.” He is such a genius that I’ve convinced myself that his revisions actually improve upon John Lennon.
:40: We’re not even one minute into this song and it’s clear that putting this many highly stylized singers in one place is a recipe for disaster. Norah Jones is doing her “medium-fancy jazz club” voice that convinced 10 million people to buy Come Away With Me in the early ’00s. After Bono and Stevie, it just sounds incoherent. When building a team, you need good roster players, which in this case means someone with experience singing back-up vocals. Where is Sheryl Crow when you need her?
1:01: I saw Brian Wilson in concert three years before this performance. It … wasn’t good. His once angelic vocals sounded ragged. His keyboard wasn’t even plugged in. This is rough but it’s much better than what I saw. You’re allowed infinite wonky Grammy collaborations when you created Pet Sounds.
1:12: Future 2019 Grammys host Alicia Keys is working very hard to save this thing. Her melisma game is fierce. Sorum, meanwhile, sounds like he’s still trying to f*ck up “November Rain.”
1:31: Scott Weiland is batting sixth, and you can tell that he’s used this to his advantage. It’s like that scene in Saving Private Ryan, when you see the first row of soldiers get blown away as they attempt to decamp on the shores of Normandy. Weiland is in that next row, and he’s pivoted “Across The Universe” into full-blown camp by doing his ultra-arch “Bowie duetting with Bing Crosby” voice. He’s the MVP of this last-place team. RIP.
1:40: Dookie-era Billie Joe Armstrong would not have done this. I don’t think even Nimrod-era Armstrong would have done it. But by ’05, in the wake of American Idiot, he had accepted his role as the Bono of pop-punk. Which is why he looks like he’s trying out for the local boy choir here. He’s Billy Joel, not Billie Joe.
2:00: The greatest jump-cut in the history of cinema occurs in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The greatest jump-cut in pop-music history is the cut here, from Billie Joe Armstrong to Tim McGraw. Billie Joe Armstrong is the monkey bone, and Tim McGraw is the spaceship.
2:22: Steven Tyler is back with the maracas.
2:42: There’s a slow, epic pan across the singers, none of whom are in tune. Bono, curiously, is not singing. I suspect he knows that it’s not going well. He’s getting those “we’re playing half-empty stadiums during the PopMart tour” vibes again.
3:11: Contrary to what this screengrab says, you can’t still download this performance at iTunes.
4:07: Bless Slash for doing the “finger in your ear so you can sing on pitch” thing that everyone does at these group celebrity sing-alongs.
4:09: Alison Krauss is neither singing nor playing her fiddle. She is the other MVP.
4:14: The group has changed the words from “nothing’s gonna change my world” to “something‘s gonna change the world.” This infusion of optimism rescues the song. The point of these collaborations are to overwhelm the audience with sutured-together star power. But the result is that it actually humanizes superstars by canceling out their talent and making them appear ordinary. This tuneless horde seems so vulnerable that it triggers my empathy and bathes me in the warmth of flawed collective humanity. I can’t sing either, but now I can, briefly, sing as well as Stevie Wonder. How beautiful.
